Banished

Ah, the city builder genre, a woefully underappreciated theme that’s had its share of massive hits (Cities: Skylines which received generally favorable critical acclaim) and tragic misses (SimCity, which seemed to go totally off the rails in the eyes of the faithful and was systematically railed against due to a required always online presence), and one that systemically gets few new entries with truly groundbreaking gameplay additions or exciting twists to conventionally time-tested staples, if released at all. Enter Banished, a Medieval-themed village simulator, created essentially by a single programmer with surprising depth, a challenging yet easy to cope with learning curve, and some nail biting moments due to the unpredictability of random weather events that may outright kill your city’s population if you’re not proactively managing the flow of daily life in your digital community. Banished takes the agent based playstyle of the recently revived, then unceremoniously shuttered, SimCity but simplifies the system and refines the flow of goods within your town’s local economy. Cash has been completely eradicated from the formula, instead opting on resource management for the currency du’ jour and every building is available for construction from the outset, something most city simulations opt against. Money is of little consequence when the main goal of your villagers is simply to stay alive by being well fed, clothed, and sheltered. The populace doesn’t need no stinkin’ money to buy what they need to stay alive as consumable goods are created and freely distributed in a perfect communist society. While Banished doesn’t contribute in grandiose ways to the genre, it’s honed approach to its guidelines, the gently increasing challenge level, and the random planetary resistance to the continued survival of your outcast citizenry all add up to a game that’s relaxing and tense in natural turns and a great diversion from some of the flashier (if not always successful) cohabiters it shares space with. The game doesn’t radically shake up the city simulation field, but what it does set out to do it does quite well even when the few problems become clearly obvious. If you’re looking for a title in a category you feel hasn’t gotten due deference, certainly nab a copy of Banished; you won’t be totally disappointed.

graphics

Most likely due to the fact that the game was almost entirely developed by a single person, the graphics in Banished are nothing to write home about, but it’s not the ugliest game I’ve come across either. Instead of saying the graphics are “bad” I prefer to think of them rather as “elegantly simple”. The game is certainly not to be used as a litmus test of bleeding edge graphic quality that a growing portion of gamers seem to think is what constitutes the mark of greatness. Landscape textures are good enough to break up what is otherwise standard fare scenery, building models are detailed enough to give your village a feeling of diversity with added touches such as wispy smoke coming from chimneys of homes with a supply of firewood, and your denizens, while creepily lacking a face and other fine details, move throughout the map with animations that are fluid and pleasing enough to the eye. No one glides across the ground with arms and legs that have no functioning joints and the game is in fully realized 3D; those of you, like myself, feeling a bit over the whole “retro, sprite-based, #The80sWereTheBEST4GAMES!” shtick that took over for a while need not worry. On the downside, you will get tired of the same graphical representations being recycled over and over again. Each map is essentially grassy plains, or grassy mountains, your residents eventually become a blur of an undifferentiated hoard of faceless people, and, beyond having a handful of distinct models for houses, a glom of identical buildings in the more advanced construction categories. The upside to all this, however, is a continually reinforced visual palette lending itself to instantly recognizable structures which slashes the guesswork of which building is which and generally makes infrastructure planning a breeze. Dividing the map between sprawling living spaces and commercial zones against the wilderness that’s required to supply your people with building materials, warmth-providing firewood, and food is a snap. From the outset it’s an easy affair to lay out a mental footprint of your citizens’ needs and desires before you’re so far in and suddenly realize you’ve made massive development mistakes that require devastating urban renewal to correct. All this is wrapped up and packaged exquisitely within the visual toolbox the game supplies the player with. In broad terms the graphics are utilitarian and convey information quickly and painlessly. Essentially they do the job they’re designed to but, in the current climate of the video game industry, it does feel like the game is missing just a dash of graphical pizazz. The barebones visual approach means a quick glance is all that’s needed to know what each district you’ve designated is meant for, making Gatling gun-like clicking obsolete as you try to drill down through mind numbing menus and charts to get the information you require, but it doesn’t take long before you’re wishing for more diversity in the palette. Menus give you everything you need to know up front and the UI is tucked neatly and unobtrusively in the lower right corner of the screen, even being nice enough to not chew up precious monitor real estate while you’re navigating to the buttons you need. Up front the visuals pull off the theme and feel of the game’s concept but eventually you feel burned out by the constant reuse of the limited pool of visual items. A minor gripe of mine, but one I can’t help but get annoyed at every time I see it, is that your citizens don’t actually enter buildings to eat or warm up, they just gather at the front door until the game recharges their hidden meters then they go on apparently contented. Also, no animations let you know your people are generally satisfied or knocking on Death’s door. Certainly not game breaking complaints but it is something that would have added that extra something to really sell the concept being presented had they been at least patched out.

Sound

Adding another layer to the soothing atmosphere, the sound effects and music in Banished are spot on and surprisingly high quality. Acoustic guitars and rhythmic percussion lull you into a calm state as you methodically take the incremental steps to building up a successful rural community. While the music sets the mood when things are going great the soundtrack doesn’t change in response to your town completely falling apart from famine, disease, or other catastrophic events that may befall your charges. People may be dying off left and right from a host of problems but the music holds steady in the same peaceful tone. If anything, it makes approaching total annihilation a problem that can be solved with diligence and a keen eye over a stressful experience that places the blame squarely on your own poor judgement should the music have been programmed to alter letting you know you’re being called the “Angel of Death” as the body count in the local cemetery keeps ticking ever higher. If you need a game space that consistently works to create a relaxing environment for when you’ve become too stressed out over more intense video games then Banished fits that bill perfectly. Ambient sound effects are noticeably limited, but there is just enough to continue to keep the game feeling genuine and a testament to the design philosophy behind it. You’ll know immediately that your foresters are doing their job as ax head hits living wood or a stonecutter’s pickaxe breaks off a chunk of granite, but elsewhere your people operate in relative silence. Carts won’t rattle down bumpy cobblestoned streets, quite conversation or the murmur of a congregation of your people is absent, and the general feeling is that your town must have some strict noise ordinances you certainly didn’t enact. The music does a fine job of covering up the lack of engrossing background clamor, but if you’re not totally immersed in the gameplay you’ll notice the deafening silence of a village full of mutes in short order. The total soundscape of Banished, much like the graphics, isn’t outright sub par and there’s just enough to flesh out the ambiance of the game without being overbearing on your system but, with enough time sunken into the game, you’ll start to pine for just a touch more. The music is like a lullaby that gently coaxes you into a hypnotic state wherein you’ll get lost in the gentle tug of the game on your attention but if you break out of the trance, for whatever reason, the overall lack of background noise (the stuff that adds to the total atmosphere a game is aiming for) will be painfully apparent. Just a few additional sound bites to round out the daily movement of your citizenry and a tad more attention paid to making the map feel more alive and diverse through sound would have gone a long, long way. For what you get, though, there’s just enough to create an effect when your attention is focused on the immediate and varied needs of city planning but the system falls apart, unfortunately, when you’re fully aware of the game as a whole and not laser focused on civic management.

GamePLay

The real meat and potatoes of any simulation game is in how the interlocking variables that need your constant attention and tweaking interact with one another to keep everything afloat and working smoothly; here is where Banished breaks free from the shortfalls of the limited set of visual and auditory files at its disposal. Banished brushes away the need for a narrative, opting instead for you to make up your own varied stories for each civilization you create. Every new game starts the same after you’ve messed around with the conditional starting parameters and decided on something you feel satisfied with: there’s no reason given for why you’re starting families have been banished (the title, get it! Alright, I won't quit my day job for stand-up comedy...) from their homeland and maybe those details are inconsequential to begin with. What’s more important is their future that’s resting squarely in your hands and the pitfalls that the natural world flings at your tiny community. A strike against the game is there’s no opening cut scene to set up at least a loose foundation for your imaginary tale as you’re simply dumped into the game with absolutely no fanfare. The goal is straightforward: set up a town that fulfills your citizens’ needs and ensure they make babies that grow into adults so you can expand your town even more. Dynamic weather plays a central role in the narrative that begins to organically emerge as your village grows and changes. The general climate, even when set to “mild”, can have wild mood swings that keep the game challenging if only feeling occasionally artificial and unfair if the dice don’t roll in your favor. Winter may come early killing crops your people subsist on, or maybe the unexpected cold snap comes at a time when your tailors are dismally understocked with raw materials and warm protective clothing isn’t available for your digital denizens to help them survive the freezing temperatures. Overall, the systems running the background number crunching have the right amount of randomness assigned so the game doesn’t necessarily leave you feeling fully punished, but every so often, for reasons I can’t fully explain, the game seems like it’s purposely stabbing you in the back even when every aspect of your village is running like a well-oiled machine. Winter, or more broadly cold, is your worst enemy in the game and while that emphasis doesn’t arbitrarily muck up the overall polished works additional natural disasters like flooding or drought would have been nice options to enable had they been present to make the seasonal game cycle even more difficult for dedicated players. But, in the broadest terms possible, the game balances challenge and reward in the correct proportion to make disaster seem like it’s waiting right around the corner and that your actions have concrete outcomes be they good or bad. Failure, often, is the player’s own mishandling of their population or poorly planned infrastructure; the game does avoid, expertly, making you feel like a loser or totally incompetent. Your villagers never revolt (they just drop dead...), the game doesn’t explicitly criticize or blame you, and feelings of inadequacy come from your own psyche rather than pop-up messages telling you how hard you’re utterly failing at the game. The various menus are all right at your fingertips and contain all the information you need while the layout is constructed as such to avoid unnecessary and unwieldy navigation, a tip a lot of developers should take note of. Simulation games are often dressed up spread sheets concealed behind pretty graphics and button mashing through endless menus in an attempt to distract the player from how little anything on the screen is truly representative of action over otherwise cold calculus and algorithms. Banished flips those ideas on their heads; most of what’s happening on your monitor is what really counts and the movement of what are otherwise empty agents that just need “filling up” with the various resources the game dictates are needed is the visual representation of background charts and tables come to gorgeous life. The few actual charts you may need to get quick demographic information to assess your city’s trajectory are straight forward and easy to read. Most of your time is spent interacting in the game itself, not slogging through endless graphs and mostly meaningless numbers that feel like they have little to no bearing on the game itself.

Banished totally throws off the shackles of combat and that may be for the best, ensuring that the game didn’t come off as being a shameless rip off of the other myriad Medieval simulation games available. The only bloodshed you’ll witness is deer being hunted for their meat and hides or livestock being slaughtered (and I mean bloodshed figuratively here…not a drop of blood is to be found in Banished). Nature is your real nemesis, not distant armies of a computer controlled AI programmed to impede your progress. To some that may be the deal breaker, but for me and my approach to city building games the decision to forgo combat was a natural fit; I was left to play and manage at my own pace without the constant pressure of building up a military supply chain that I’m mostly uninterested in anyway. Not having artificial counter moves from an opponent to worry about left me to my own devices and success or failure were mine alone to contend with without feeling like I had to make decisions I wasn’t interested in making in the first place. If you’re looking for a game that requires split-second choices, a working knowledge of an encyclopedia’s worth of a game manual, or setting up complex supply chains then Banished will certainly not fulfill. If you’re looking for a game to sit down to with a glass of wine and a tranquil space to tool around in after a long day in the real world then look no farther than Banished to sooth your frayed nerves. While I find Banished to be refined and attentive to what it sets out to accomplish, and I respect the fact that a game with this level of sophistication came from one person, the game will eventually drag against itself since friction is inevitable in an experience operating in tight confinement with limited assets. After your first few towns are set up, and you get a feel for how the game gently expresses how it wants to be played, the endless redundancy and strictures become like a snake eating its own tail. It doesn’t take long to see all the sights the game has to offer, though replayability is extended with a generous list of achievements to aspire to, some of which are quite difficult to attain. I’m not one to care about trophies at all in gaming, and by and large I find them mostly pointless since they don’t necessarily mean you’re a better gamer (or person!) than others, but they seem like a natural extension of the gameplay in Banished. I attribute this mostly to the game’s relaxed posture and languid flow; be prepared to be mesmerized for quite some time as the game tends to draw you in and before you know it you’ve just socked away five hours and probably left real-world responsibilities shamefully neglected. Those hard-to-reach achievements will be close at hand quicker than you may be aware through normal, slightly dedicated gameplay. New life is breathed into the game when you’ve grown weary of the up-front offerings through the Steam Workshop. Be aware that having mods active will prevent the game from reporting achievement milestones, so you’re essentially stuck with the vanilla version if you’re going a’huntin’. The Workshop is full of really high quality mods from new buildings and resources to entirely new gameplay modes, all up for grabs and all for free. There is a disturbing amount of duplicate posting which smacks of outright plagiarism. Those posting the work of others make the flimsy claim that they’re just making available to the public additional gameplay items that are hosted elsewhere that may be difficult to obtain while simultaneously offering the ease of use the Workshop offers for installing and managing mods. I don’t buy it for a second and if you’re a conscionable gamer you’ll need to dig around a lot to find mods that are posted by their original creator. It’s a shame Banished is suffering from this within its own player base; I have the feeling that a lot of talented people are nervous to share mods that change the game in awesome ways for fear that their work won’t be respected. It’s something I’ve never seen anywhere on Steam before, but knowing a game with this potential is being abused is saddening. Banished is just itching for a proper expansion pack from the developer, though my current understanding is the project is considered complete in its current state. Hopefully a turn of events leads to extra paid-for content, a sentiment I don’t normally feel which should be indicative of how successful DLC may be for the game if a hardnosed “anti-DLCer” is begging for a developer to take his cash!

Final Thoughts

Banished came along at the opportune time; the latest SimCity from the now defunct Maxis was breathing its last and shedding support from its install base and Cities: Skylines was starting to show glaring holes in its initial public offering from a lack of meaningful long-term playability. Banished filled a void with quiet confidence and gave the city building genre a shot of much needed life. What Banished does it does well and with grace, but if it got just a little more attention from its developer post-release it would be on the fast track to being nearly perfect. The vanilla version will wear out its welcome and, I hate to say it, that day may come quickly for many players due to the limited offerings the game has out of the box. If you’re not collecting achievements and the game feels like it’s starting to become boring then hop into the Steam Workshop and poke around; you’ll find more than enough to satisfy your need for differentiation and some of the mods add enormous amounts of additional content. This may be where some players who haven’t jumped into the game may gripe. I find it better to look at Banished less as a complete video game and more as a platform which the masses can manipulate and twist to their own liking rather than being a set of rigid instructions that have to be followed at the cost of everything else. For some the lack of an end-game scenario, or that previously mentioned set of firm directions, may be a huge turn off; if that’s the case you’re right in avoiding Banished as it will certainly disappoint on that front. But the ace up Banished’s sleeve is that it doesn’t try to be all thing to all people and therefore watered down and half baked; why waste limited development time and money adding in everything yourself when the play base can do it for you in incremental steps? I find that nothing but pure genius especially since the game on a technical level is overwhelmingly complete so player-made mods don't feel like a cheap cop out or overt stinginess on the behalf of the dev. The focus is squarely on select aspects cherry picked from the best in show of the genre with the option of layering on ever increasing complexity from player made modifications until the perfect balance is struck depending on your personal set of skills, attitude, or playstyle. Casual gamers looking to translate their skills off their mobile devices and into the increasingly walled off PC scene (I’m looking at you griefers and noob bashers!) will appreciate Banished as it stands for providing a subdue nature that never openly mocks failure or missteps. Seasoned city planners will hungrily snap up mods off the Workshop that add additional depth and increase the challenge to acceptable levels. Banished does have something for everybody in an oblique way that creatively solves a fractional problem inherent in video games. If you’re on the fence about buying Banished I can speak confidently that it’s a purchase you won’t have regret over later. Because the game can be manipulated and customized once it starts to go stale, in whatever current configuration you have set up, it can easily be changed to suit your existing needs. The lack of a narrative or clear goals may leave a bitter taste in the mouths of some players and for those I recommend skipping over Banished unless you’re really into modding your games; at that point other options open up in the Workshop that can add more defined goals or add more structured gameplay options. Also, for those staunchly in the “It Must Be Complete at Release” camp you’ll most likely be overwhelmingly disappointed with the game as it comes off more as a scaffold on which to hang extra content rather than a game that’s been over processed and with a huge budget to boot. Any city builder fan will instantly find something to love with Banished, and those of you nervous to dip your toe into the PC or simulation scene Banished comes with a hearty recommendation. With the exception of a narrow strip of the gaming community, Banished is an excellent addition to your library and it won’t feel out of place or inferior when occupying the same space as those seminal titles that have come to define city simulation games.